How did Ridley Scott come to direct ‘Alien’?
In late 1977, Ridley Scott was already 40 years old but had just one feature film to his name, the low-budget British period drama The Duellists which had yet to even make it into cinemas. At the same time, the Alien franchise was barely the embryonic speck of an ovamorph in the imagination of screenwriter Dan O’Bannon’s imagination.
It was the tail end of the New Hollywood era. Star Wars had just been released to unprecedented fanfare and commercial success. All the major studios were on the lookout for the next megahit, a surefire banker that would emulate the two movies which had effectively invented the blockbuster between them. In other words, “Jaws in space”, which happened to be precisely what O’Bannon and his fellow Alien creator Ronald Shusett pitched to 20th Century Fox.
The studio was sold and was prepared to put an eight-figure budget behind the picture. Now, all it needed was a director at the helm capable of handling a production of such enormous scope. Big hitters like John Boorman, of Point Blank and Deliverance fame, and New Hollywood titan Robert Altman were being lined up accordingly. The problem was, as O’Bannon, Shusett, and the producers from Fox subsidiary Brandywine saw it, these directors would consider the movie beneath their own status as auteurs.
They needed new blood with a fresh take, who’d be as invested in creating the world of Alien on screen as they’d been in creating it on paper. Cue a call to Ridley Scott, who was still getting over seeing Star Wars on the day it opened in cinemas at the time. “I was depressed for three months,” Scott recalled to the Hollywood Reporter in 2019.
So, why did they call Scott specifically?
Even though it hadn’t yet found a distributor, Scott’s first film, The Duellists, had impressed at Cannes, winning the award for best newcomer. And crucially, it made Fox CEO at the time, Alan Ladd Jr, sit up and take notice. “I’m still, to this day, baffled about how someone who is at Cannes seeing The Duellists had put two and two together and said, ‘You know what? You might want to meet this guy because he may be the right one for Alien,’” Scott mused. “That’s how it happened.”
There’s not much more to it than that. Fox and Brandywine Productions liked his movie, had a gut feeling he might work for theirs, and took a punt on him. But only after being turned down by four other bigger names, of course. Scott remembered reading the script and thinking, “This has put off four of the directors.”
Specifically, the moment he read that a “thing comes out of a guy’s chest.” But Scott himself couldn’t wait to get started on storyboarding the production. “Because I’m a bit of a designer, I could see the film, and I knew exactly what to do.”
Only few such risks taken on a director have paid off as well as the decision to put Scott in charge of Alien. O’Bannon and Shusett might have dreamed up the thing, but Scott is the undisputed architect of the world now cherished and beloved by sci-fi and horror fans alike.
